Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Can Technology End Poverty?


Can Technology End Poverty?

by Susan Davis | 10:00 AM March 22, 2013

If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty. Advances have indeed made a huge difference in the lives of the poor, but there's also a healthy amount of skepticism out there. Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama has a blog dedicated to calling out naïve or inappropriate uses of information and communication technologies (ICT).





The organization I'm part of, BRAC, is known for going to scale with solutions that are often radically low-tech. We're more likely to scale up birthing kits that cost less than 50 cents apiece than mobile apps that might diagnose disease; more likely to open one-room schools in rented spaces or evenboats, where children sit on the floor and learn to think creatively, than insist that every pupil have Internet access.


Anumakonda Jagadeesh comments

Yes. Technology can end poverty. Technology advancement should be centered around common man. The technology should be coupled with social justice.

The Challenge today is to harness science to the chariot wheels of progress and to press science as a deliberate tool to serve the basic needs of the common man and contribute to the economic, social, and cultural transformation of the country.